What Is Your Most Gross, Yucky, Disgusting Nursing Horror Story?

[yazisizit]

I was working a night shift on a tele floor as a new Nurse.

We had this one poor old lady who was confused and was restrained as usual for her safety. She was our designated resident nightmare geri from hell, so she was placed near the Nurse's station.

So we are chilling out at the Nurse's station, chatting and trying to get through another night...

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see our lady in question standing in the dimly lit doorway of her room!

I instantly leap out and run to her. As I approach her, she appears to be falling towards me, so I meet her in a bear hug...my arms around her waste, and her arms around my shoulders.

As I catch the lady, I notice a very strong smell of feces, and I feel something warm on my hands, arms and shoulders...

My fellow heroes come in behind me, and as the lights are turned on, my worst fears are instantly realized.

Yes, I caught the poor old lady with a good old bear hung football catch, but I was also covered in the lady's feces.

As I look at her, she has feces smeared all over her arms and hands... (and even her face!)

And of course, now so did I!

[UnewmeB4]

My friend in a nursing home, saw one of his patients sitting at the end of the hall, eating something. When he got close enough, he almost gagged. The old guy, who was notorious for removing his ostomy bag, was holding it on his lap, using it as his "dip" for his crackers.

[elizabells, BSN, RN]

I was just curious how feces got in your grandpas coffin? Wasn't he embalmed?

If the orifice isn't sutured, what's in the bowels can leak out. I don't think there's a way to purge the GI tract. I direct everyone to Mary Roach's excellent book "Stiff".

[EDNURSEANGEL]

One of my most unusual experiences was this.

We had just hired a new crop of nurse externs in the busy emergency department where I work. We hace a pt come in with necrotic fingers. You know the mummfied kind that will just break off. In the course of transfering the pt to the stretcher, we broke off one of the fingers. I asked one of the externs to do some thing with it. He later told me that he had placed it in a urine cup on the counter. He didn't tell that he had poured peroxide in the cup( he thought to perserve it.) Later there was a small explosion as the gases built up and the cup exploded. I'm not sure if we ever found the finger.

All the rest of my disgusting experiences always involve urine. My patients haved p****d in their barf bags then dropped them on the floor, small emesis basins, the trash can, and my all time fav the coffeepot we kept on the back hall for patients and their families. We no longer have a coffee pot.

Just another p***y day in the ED.

Angel

[SaderNurse05, BSN, RN]

Just yesterday, a really nice patient with C Diff was on her way to the bathroom. She betn over and her poop SHOT out with such force that it covered the wall, the chair, the IV stand, her foley bag and tube. It was everywhere except on her. Seriously, not a drop on her at all. So much fun cleaning in droplet precautions garb

[melzan]

I work on the medsurg floor and we had a confused lady who we had in a geri chair at the nurses station. At one point I walked by and noticed her eating something and she was very preoccupied with what she was doing. When I looked closer she had her dentures in her hand and was taking her finger nail and scraping the white crud off the teeth and eating it! That was the closest I ever came to actually puking at work.

[melzan]

I had an obese patient one night and everytime I went into her room she had her hands down south digging around ( and not the back end either). She wasn't confused and the smell was strong. I tried to stay out of reach, but I was to slow one time and she grabbed my forearm while talking to me. The smell was awful and this whole time she is gripping my arm and talking and I can't get away. It was so hard not to just freak out and run! Of course, everyone got a kick out of it and I spent the rest of the shift scrubbing down.

[Jen,SN]

Last week was one of the few times I actually went home from work feeling dirty. Lady on hospice with a massive wound infection--she had some kind of pouching system over the main wound, on her abdomen(surgical wound, open abdomen), a j-tube and g-tube that were draining, 3 ostomy bags being used for wound drainage, plus a colostomy and a foley. It took almost an hour to empty everything and get her cleaned up. Was wearing a mask smeared with peppermint spirits and still about gagged. Went home and immediately showered.

[FranEMTnurse, CNA, LPN, EMT-I]

When Working on the Gyn floor, we had a pt come in who had had a tampon in her for over a week. It was "stuck". In the meantime, she was still having sex. Let's just say, the odor when the Transporter lifted the sheet as we transferred her...was horrific. as in...it was enough to gag a maggot.

It's a wonder she didn't get toxic shock syndrome.

[Regina66]

These are really gross..

Mine happened one day at the Nursing Home I was working at as a CNA. I set out trays in the dining area one table at a time. I was almost finished when I heard the people at the table across the room saying, "EWWWWWW". (FYI..when you hear these people saying EWWWWW you better brace yourself!) A lady had vomited into her plate. She spit out her false teeth in the process. She calmly picked up her teeth sucked them clean and started eating again...gross!!!

[VivaLasViejas, ASN, RN]

My latest poop story is pretty mild compared with the last several posts, but it was rather amusing.........

Yesterday I admitted a 49-year-old woman for, of all things, bowel obstruction. Or as our hospitalists like to call it, obstipation :chuckle

She hadn't had a BM in 13 days---on lots of narcotics and psych meds, unfortunately with little fluid intake thanks to Roux-en-Y surgery in 2002. (She lost over 130# and is now a size 4.....hmmmmmmm........) Anyway, in addition to being rather an anxious, flighty sort, she felt totally miserable, and her poor little belly was so distended I was almost afraid to touch my stethoscope to it to listen for bowel tones. So of course the MD ordered soap-suds enemas Q 4 hours, GoLytely (which may take her about a month to finish at the rate she was sipping it), Dulcolax, the FOS regimen.

Well, I hadn't given an old-fashioned SSE since my nursing-home days, and with an A&O patient you can't really fake things, so I told the patient flat out, "Look, I'm sorry but I've got to do this, it won't be pleasant for either of us, but we'll get through it together." At least I remembered to use warm water and plenty of chux pads......well, no sooner had I inserted two inches of tubing when I ran into a block of hard-as-rock, firmly impacted stool, and she jumped so high I thought I'd have to scrape her off the ceiling. Then there was the matter of instilling the fluid itself: she couldn't tolerate more than a few cc's at a time, so it took over 20 minutes just to get half the solution in. This was, of course, at the end of the shift.......here I was supposed to be at report, and instead I was trying to get this stupid enema in before my back broke in two at the waist line.

Then, about two minutes after I finally gave up, the patient yelled, "Oh, I've gotta go NOW!!!" I helped her out of bed, she hit the floor running---literally---and let go with a huge "PLOP! PLOP! PLOP!" Three egg-sized poops landed on the floor, along with a healthy amount of loose watery stool that had been oozing around the obstructions.

Now, based on her behaviors earlier in the shift I would have thought she'd have been embarrassed, but this gal started pumping her fist and going "YESSSSSSSSS!" Then she threw her arms around me and hugged me for dear life, thanking me profusely for delivering her from "two weeks of Hell"!

Even her husband, who had remained in the room through this whole ordeal, was filled with gratitude: "Oh, Cindy, look at all the poop!! thank you so much, Nurse, you've saved the day!!"

Well, by this time I was getting embarrassed, so I made an excuse about needing to page Housekeeping. When I finally left for the evening, I could hear, all the way down the hall, that she was evidently experiencing more success as I heard her spouse calling to her through the door, "How big is THIS one?" :chuckle You'd have thought they were having a baby.

[ERNurse752, RN]

mjlrn, they should name one of them after you.

[boulergirl, CNA]

These are really gross..

Mine happened one day at the Nursing Home I was working at as a CNA. I set out trays in the dining area one table at a time. I was almost finished when I heard the people at the table across the room saying, "EWWWWWW". (FYI..when you hear these people saying EWWWWW you better brace yourself!) A lady had vomited into her plate. She spit out her false teeth in the process. She calmly picked up her teeth sucked them clean and started eating again...gross!!!

Oh, nasty. :barf01: